Even if they had finished and shipped that game 2 years ago without a single bug and all the promised features it would’ve not been the right game for everybody. This is IMO part of the very concept from the very start. Space games are not for everybody. Even good ones.
I wonder how many of the people who dislike Star Citizen as a game actually like space games?
Even with FPS elements, mining, trading and dogfights, space is a huge place and it takes a certain type of person to enjoy flying around in a ship for longer than a minute.
I was positive on crowdfunding but cases like this show that giving teams money before they deliver is not good for consumers. It gives an advantage for marketing-driven teams while there's no accountability and no hard reason to deliver. See Kickstarter and Indiegogo with lots of slick videos but really not much to actually use
Maybe Kickstarter and such platforms need to put up a system where the consumer only pays 10%-50% of the final retail price until the product is completed.
But that isn't their model. Their model is to let the seller set up "reward tiers", and usually the tier that corresponds with "get the final product early!" comes at a bit of a discount off the "final retail price".
But even in your case, it's extremely flawed, how can you know the final retail price before they set a final retail price?
The original intent of these systems was to crowdfund printing costs for small-run art projects and the like, where the money would need to be actually spent to produce the items. Not paying the creator upfront would destroy that use case.
There are plenty of success stories, among many highly publicized failures. I don’t think we should write the whole thing off. When backing a product, remember that you’re playing the role of an investor, rather than a consumer, so you have to be more wary. When you pay to back an MMO, remember that it has probably the hardest road to success of any type of video game.
Money is only one kind of investment, regular exercise has a different but still valuable reward.
Getting something that does not exist yet is the payout. Handing over money for say a 1/3 chance of the reward is what separates this from a normal purchase. But, hopefully you understand that risk going in.
The comment to which I was replying implied that participating in a kickstarter was like being an investor (from context, in the financial sense of that word).
So we're talking financial investments, not regular exercise.
In the financial sense, an investment is where you put money in with the hope of getting more money out. There are levels of risk, and generally the more risky the investment the higher the expected payout.
That's not what kickstarter is, at all, as you have zero chance of getting more money out (in this kickstarter for example)
you're giving someone money in exchange for the hope of a product downt the line.
Still, you can get more value out than you put in depending on how you value the output. Many kickstarter’s are not items that you can buy but rather art projects. How valuable is it for something to exist in this world even if you don’t own it?
Now, that’s less true if games or flashlights. But, even if that specific item does not get created simply proving a market for it exists can provide value.
Consider, if 10$ helps creat a great restaurant near you. Simply being able to eat at it would provide value even without getting a discount.
So when someone uses the phrase (which is what I responded to)
"remember that you’re playing the role of an investor, rather than a consumer"
you don't take from it that this was meant as a short-hand for financial investor?
If not then semantic differnce, but there is a persistent meme whenever kickstarter is discussed on HN that backing is akin to financial investment rather than purchase, and I disagree with that meme.
Sure you can back something purely for the hope that it will happen, and I've done that, but you're not a financial investor in that product/service/etc
It’s descriptive as you are a financial investor as you’re investing money not time etc.
I think they promote the term backers which is also used for people who donate to charity. Unlike with charity you can get meaningful payout rather than a token item. Still, the highest rewards are often symbolic in nature just like charity’s “gold donor” lists etc.
"When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward. Once a creator has done so, they’ve satisfied their obligation to their backers. "
if a kickstarter has symbolic rewards, then sure that's fine.
But otherwise it's a contractual obligation to provide a reward in exchange for money. Not a donation, not an investment.
A bond is a contract with specific terms and an investment at the same time.
The only real difference between a kickstarter and a bond is handing back money vs handing back something other than money. Well, granted interest payments don’t compound.
Investing doesn't have to mean "buying equity". An upfront cash sum with a defined return is a common form of investment. That's exactly what Kickstarter is.
Not in the sense of financial investment it's not, unless the defined return is actually bigger (in monetary terms) than the investment.
you're referring to something like a bond, that pays back more money than is invested.
Kickstarter does nothing of the kind. There you pay money in return someone gives you goods (virtual or physical) that's not an investment, it's a purchase.
I've worked for companies that have taken a cash investment in return for no equity on the proviso that we worked on the development of a product (or features of a product) in return. It's an investment. No return other than a decent attempt to build the product was expected. When you work in 'speculative' development it's quite common.
"When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward. Once a creator has done so, they’ve satisfied their obligation to their backers. "
You're clearly paying money to the creator in return for the stated reward, you're not investing in the hope that they might create (unless that is what was stated in the Kickstarter)
You're right, my analogy is too simplistic. You're acting as an investor only in the sense that you're taking a risk, and paying to help make the product a reality. I think people often feel burned or contribute to bad projects because they're thinking of it like a normal consumer product, where the risk of getting nothing is basically 0
I was positive on crowdfunding but cases like this show that giving teams money before they deliver is not good for consumers.
At no point on Kickstarter does it ever say you're buying the final product. Kickstarter is not a store. You're not paying someone to make the thing they're kickstarting. You're investing so they can give it a good shot.
Perhaps there's an argument that crowd-funding sites need to be even more upfront about how it works, but withholding the money until the team is finished would just mean 99% of projects never happen. That's far worse for the consumer.
I disagree. Now it's opinion vs opinion. I could play a few missions, did a bit of bounty hunting, a bit of mining. I've played "finished" AAA games which had less.
There's much to do, but the game is in a far better state than a year ago. Everything else is subjective and it's hard to have a discussion if all you provide is two (and a half) words.
It is only mismanagement if it is judged by common goals such as returns for investors and shareholders or meeting deadlines for release to customers. Instead Star Citizen gives priority to the quality and richness of experience and have allowed that to determine the schedule.
Under any circumstances buying into a software prerelease is high risk. In this case the project lead has described this as his dream project and spoken of how quality will drive the schedule. Expecting such a strategy to deliver early or even on time seems optimistic.
I was considering "pledging" to this game a year or two ago. Luckily I didn't, and it was because the supporters on every SC forum were the most cult-like, rabid fanboys I've ever encountered in the gaming world.
It felt like they were all using the same playbook to respond to any question that could be considered negative. E.g. If you asked about the game being Pay-to-Win, they'd all say "There's no such thing as winning an MMORPG, so it can't be Pay-to-Win", which is an impressive feat of mental gymnastics when literally everything in the game can already be purchased with real money.
There are people who have "invested" over $20,000 in this game. Other people built gaming PCs three years ago specifically to play it, most of which will be woefully inadequate by the time it launches.
I hope someone makes a documentary about this one day. Or maybe that was Chris Roberts' plan all along?
I never backed the game but I watch their dev videos on youtube from time to time and quite enjoy doing so, because they are quite transparent about a lot of issues as well as solutions they came up with. There are e.g. Episodes where they specifically explain how they do project managment, which tools they use etc.
From what I saw I didn’t have the feeling the game was in apathological state. There seems to be a lot of movement (but it is a huge project).
Not sure if I would ever play it, but they came up with many interesting solutions that seem to work better than many existing things out there and I kinda like their way of sharing it without assuming the viewers are idiots
Bugsmashers was a particularly fun series, unfortunately (for us) Mark Abent got promoted, didn't have time for it, and the show was canceled.
My other favorite thing was the monthly updates from their Frankfurt studio where most of the engine development happens, but it's been a while since they did those too.
All the community outreach content is currently getting rejiggered and the jury's still out on whether the new lineup is any good. Last week was the first episode of "Inside Star Citizen" and there should be a new one later today.
It started out in a pathological state, and it's been getting worse ever since. The specific pathology is one of excessive scope. The game is trying to do and be far too much, even with the level of funding they've gotten. They seem to want to do Eve Online, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, and Halo, but all in one game.
Eve Online alone took fifteen years to get where it's gotten, and probably spent much more than $300 million to do it over that time period. That's just for one of the three things Star Citizen is trying to be. By the way, it's a lot cheaper to build out a game like this when you do it gradually. Doing anything fast is generally more expensive than doing it slow, because you need a bigger team and there is consequently more coordination overhead and risk. You also run less risk of building the wrong thing when you take it slow, because you have an established player base that's telling you what it wants.
One of my close friends joined the team as a programmer not long ago, and he's said that since then the team has grown massively. Say what you will about their way of investment (ridiculously overpriced ships and whales throwing ten's of thousands at the game for things that don't exist yet), they're not squandering that money. They've gone all out on hiring talent, and a huge amount of investment is still going in.
I don't think that's true about the gaming computers. I'm playing with fine with a GTX 970, which is a midrange enthusiast card from 2014. Not stable 60 fps or anything impressive, but it runs. And the framerates are trending upward with new updates, not down.
The $20,000+ backers do strike me as crazy, yeah. But on the other hand, it's not a total waste like Clash of Clans where you're just throwing money into a pit with no hope that anything useful will come of it. These are people supporting a game that would never have gotten made through the traditional publisher model.
And like the Forbes article says, maybe it will never get finished on the crowdfunded model either. But I don't think that's a forgone conclusion.
> The $20,000+ backers do strike me as crazy, yeah.
I have the same feeling. Yeah, it's a bit crazy to throw so much money at a game. But it is also crazy to throw that much money at a car or any other hobby. But no one blinks an eye. People just say "you've earned it" or "but it's a really nice car" as if that somehow changes the fact that it's just a vanity item which you can throw away in a few years.
I've thrown 45 Dollar at SC. Maybe that's crazy. But I've also thrown more than money at Anthem and that is an AAA game by a well known studio with "proper" management. And so far it didn't turn out really well.
People don't throw away cars. Where did you get that idea? Those who don't want to keep their car after a few years already lease and everyone else sells their car if they want a different one. Even cars that have lost 90% of their value can still be exported to developing countries. Meanwhile video game servers often shutdown within 10 years and you will be left with nothing.
Nobody's talking about throwing away cars, he's talking about throwing money at cars. There are definitely people who have spent an extra $20,000 on a car that they didn't need to spend, with no expectation of getting a return on investment out of it. Lots of people have done that.
I had hopes long ago when kickstarter first came out. Now, not so much. It's a graveyard of 'almost succeeded', 'good idea but execution failed', and 'scammers'.
What I was hoping long ago was that KS would have been a place to buy shares of equity, and be part owner of these ventures. Instead it turned into a "ebay of almost buy". That way would have been a way of democratizing ownership without doing a traditional IPO - yet also targeting people who believe.
(As an aside, the SEC also punishes people under the 1% class, by preventing many types of investments to the rest of us. Note how IPFS's FileCoin IPO was only for the millionaire class. Risk is risk, but the SEC prevents new risk and opportunities except to the millionaires.)
It is what it is. Ideas put into work by using money from (lots of) small resources. Most are very passionate about it and really want to succeed, but the risks are huge due to various reasons.
I have kickstarted a videogame that's still not available after years, but the developer gives monthly honest feedbacks which have been very entertaining. I don't expect to have a game within the next 3 years, but i don't really care much. He got his adventure, i got mine.
I also kickstarted a board game that has never ever been finished completely and never will. It works, but there is zero communication or updates. Just silence. That hurted way more.
It's really frustrating because there are multiple great games that have come out of kickstarter like hollow knight and hyper light drifter, but many people getting burned by undelivered promises has halved the amount of money being donated to video game related kickstarters between 2014 and 2016 [1]. There's a lot of potential and there is a lot to lose if indie game companies do not get the opportunity and resources to make great games that are competing against an oversaturated and established and continual growing industry that is focused on micro-transactions and further monetization of in-game content.
In addition to your point, I think another big factor is the rise of early access games. Before Kickstarter got big in 2012/2013, there wasn't an easy way to do crowd funding or early access (now supported on Steam, Xbox, Epics game store, etc). The only real option was rolling your own solution like games like Minecraft or Spy Party did.
Indeed, early access games have a similar problem where certain developers get a lot of initial capital for an incomplete game and then slow down the development process for one reason or another, sometimes even completely abandoning the state of the game at a point that is no where near the vision they pitched to players. It's understandably getting harder for people to put trust into up-and-coming projects.
The funniest example of a game from Kickstarter would be Elite: Dangerous - a spacesim by a well-known author without most of the features Roberts tries to deliver.
Because Elite delivers on a lot of the promises of Star Citizen, and it’s a mature, actively supported game with a dedicated player base that you can buy today. The fact that you can’t walk around with your avatar actually makes the game more immersive; though you can deploy a rover on rocky planets without an atmosphere. It’s lacking a lot of non-gameplay features, but the space flight and combat systems are tight — the physics are accurate if you accept the existence of “frame shift drives”.
I find any time you can walk around in an open world game, it ends up becoming an MMORPG. Elite very much does not feel like an MMO. You really only encounter other players around major trading hubs and combat zones inside the bubble, and even then not many due to the way they shard the instancing. Space is empty and unforgiving.
as soon as VR headset resolution gets a little better (and we have GPUs that can drive that higher res well), I might start spending a DANGEROUS amount of time in Elite.
It's already incredible with the HTC Vive, and you definitely get used to how it looks, but the resolution just isn't quite there (e.g. its especially noticeable if you are trying to railgun someone from a significant distance)
Not sure what the other commenter was referring to, but to me it's amusing because Elite: Dangerous is a (somewhat) similar game that followed the opposite path of Star Citizen: They started with an MVP, got that to market and have been gradually expanding on it over time.
Even the most diehard Star Citizen supporters will readily admit that there is no game right now. Tech demo is the best way to describe it, as ssully already said.
I heard from a friend of mine who's into board game that the same is happening with Cool Mini or Not, hogging the KS space for board games with huge goals and expensive figurines and leaving little breathable space for other companies or people trying to get their games on the market or even just being visible.
CMN is using KS to bootstrap their products to the detriment of other smaller dev who can't even test the water and see if the product could be made.
> many people getting burned by undelivered promises has halved the amount of money being donated to video game related kickstarters between 2014 and 2016
I think you might have misread that wikipedia page... it says “In March 2014, Kickstarter announced it had achieved over $1 billion in pledges, with more than $215 million of that dedicated for video gaming and tabletop gaming projects.[23] By mid-2016, Kickstarter reported over $186 million in video game-related pledges with over $500 million for all game-related projects.”
[Edit: my reading in the following paragraph is wrong too, see my reply below. Kickstarter funding for games increased. It did not decline.] Between 2014 and 2016, video game donations dropped by around 14%, while total Kickstarter projects dropped by 50%. Video games vastly outperformed other categories on Kickstarter. That tends to indicate Kickstarter lost popularity in general while video games did not. It would be wrong to not assume that some of Kickstarter’s decline came from competition ramping up, like IndieGogo, RocketHub, FundRazr, Fundable, Pozible, etc., etc.. You’d need to look at aggregate contributions to figure out whether crowdfunding for games is actually in decline.
> there is a lot to lose if indie game companies do not get the opportunity and resources to make great games
We don’t have any strong evidence that indie game funding is even in decline. Kickstarter contributions are rather far from representing the available “opportunity” for indie games. Since crowd funding wasn’t a thing 10 years ago, indie opportunities are still way ahead of where they were in the very recent past.
That said, why isn’t having some competition for funds a good thing? It’s not like every indie game ever made is amazing. All the crazy amount of funding available today is definitely attracting more people in search of dollars, people who wouldn’t normally make games, and aren’t committed to making high quality games. The funding for games is a big part of the reason the market feels over saturated.
Look closer. It’s saying $215 million for all games in 2014, both video games and table games.
Then $500 million in 2016 for both categories, with video games alone being $186M.
This is saying that video game funding grew massively -- more that 2x -- in those two years. Neither category declined, and it’s not comparing total contributions.
Games today are $1B in crowd funding. Games are the top category on Kickstarter. Games project success rates are 6th out of the 15 major categories. More games have raised over $1M on Kickstarter than any other category.
The more I look, the more it's clear that funding on Kickstarter and in general for indie games has never been bigger or brighter than it is today.
I remember backing a language learning game over 6 years ago on kickstarter. I still receive emails about its progress and development, it's almost depressing.
If anyone's interested in the financial side of things, as the companies involved are UK entities all their accounts are available for free through the excellent UK Gov site.
Eh, I chucked them $50 or whatever it was for what was clearly a 10+ year project (at the time I gave them my money). I've had fun playing the modules already released but if they never deliver a full game I can think of worse things I've spend $50 on.
I've always seen crowd funding as chucking a little money at an idea that interests you, if it works then cool, if not then it wasn't (and shouldn't ever be) an amount I'm going to lose sleep over.
As for the people spending thousands of dollars on promised future digital shiny things? I just don't understand it, why are you paying money for virtual things that don't exist yet in a game that doesn't even exist yet? But then I've never understood the (reasonably) recent trend for paying hundreds/thousands of dollars on cosmetic items for games that you're actually playing so maybe I'm missing something.
Given the reception of No Man's Sky, I would say that the advantage of spending money on things that will remain forever in the future is that they will never disappoint you; they will remain Peter Pan objects, never to age or confront reality. You're buying an aspiration, a dream, and if you can get thousands to dream along with you, all the better. The real "game" is not some bytes in a database nor pixels in the screen, it's in the head of the players, and as such does not require physical referents to play. This makes it the ultimate postmodern game.
Who needs virtual reality when you have hyperreality?
(I could go on like this but I refer you to Baudrillard on the hyper-real and simulacra. Buying a virtual object that doesn't even have a virtual existence is clearly a stage 4 "simulacra". This comment should not be taken entirely seriously or literally, either.)
> Given the reception of No Man's Sky, I would say that the advantage of spending money on things that will remain forever in the future is that they will never disappoint you
I think it's important to add this: No Man's Sky turned out to be a great game! It just took about a year longer than expected and in the meantime Hello Games got the full fury of the internet. But they didn't stop. They buckled down and worked on it. And it turned out just fine.
Yes, I've got a good number of hours of enjoyment out of it - but only by ignoring the hype and waiting until the first Steam discount. As a Roger Dean art generator it's fantastic.
This is also why I stopped preordering games that are available from an online store. I understand the anticipation for when you can finally play a game you've been waiting on, but that experience doesn't change whether you pre-order it or not. If you simply must be separated from your money, there are places where you can put that money for the same period of time and they will pay you for it. The only difference is the story you're told about what you've just done with your money, and working with a bank isn't nearly as fun as buying a game on Steam (though the promise by the bank is approximately the same kind of game).
Kickstarter is sort of like a more up-front version of this, in that it's easier to figure out what you're actually paying for than standard pre-ordering of a product that does exist. Of course there's the default story that you're supporting the independent developers. But I haven't joined a Kickstarter without the expectation of some product at the end of it... so in these cases, I'm paying money now in an attempt to create a future where this thing that does not exist now, does actually exist.
What a time to be alive. All of my grandparents watched every dollar of their cash flows, and here I am throwing money at people I'll never meet, working with hundreds or thousands of people doing the same thing: trying to conjure up some new reality we'll experience for a very brief period of time through a 24" screen.
To me it seems quite simple: when you invest into a thing you take a risk. You are not paying to get a product, you are investing into something that could or could not work out.
E.g. I bought Risk of rain 2 in the pre release for 17€ Because I liked the first part and I thought these devs deserve to try something new. I was prepared for the worst (it is a alpha after all), but it turned out to be one of the best 17€ I ever spent on a game already.
> You are not paying to get a product, you are investing into something that could or could not work out.
Yes, but Kickstarter's angle is that it will work out. That's the underlying assumption. People don't usually give away their money for nothing, they need some idea that they'll get something in return. I think Kickstarter is actually more harmful to the cognitive processes involved in creating these illusions, since the future product is usually fairly well-defined from the beginning... so the illusions designed to attract your money happens in the beginning, and then the developer just needs to manage the backers' expectations until the product is released. At which point everyone will be busy comparing the actual product with their expectations, and hopefully enjoying the game too, and no one is getting their money back.
I'm not saying RoR2 wasn't worth your money. That 2-for-1 deal was a good way to balance taking your money before giving you anything (I think that deal was pre-release). Early Access releases are another good balance I think (I feel the same way about Slay the Spire as you do RoR2 -- best $20 game I've ever bought and 1 year before release). But you alone didn't decide they deserve your money, they gave you the option to recognize that feeling, by sending some cash their way.
If you imagine the same thing happening in a face-to-face exchange, it's pretty weird, and that makes me feel uneasy about this whole trend. If it wouldn't happen face-to-face, but it happens when we're all forming opinions about it separately, it seems like something else is going on besides just selling video games.
People made many predictions back then, some said it'll never achieve that level of detailed game play while supporting multiplayer. And yet, look how far that game has went today.
Pretty impressive already if I do say so myself.
I'm looking forward to see it's completion. And even if somehow it failed, I think it's already a nice game.
Just curious - what elements of the game do you find pretty impressive and nice? There doesn't seem to be much of a game loop, or anything to do really other than some broken fetch quests. I've definitely seen a few impressive looking screenshots, but the graphics are starting to look a bit dated already. Based on some of the current bugs/issues, it seems to be missing quite a bit of core technology needed to make that promised detailed multiplayer a reality.
As somebody who didn’t back the but followed some of the dev stuff purely out of curiosity I would say it is exactly the other way around. They did a lot in the tech behind it, while a lot of the gameplay stuff started to come together just in the recent months. Purely from my limited subjective perspective I have the feeling they built a pretty solid ground for implementing content and gameplay alike
Not trying to be mean here but don't you think some of these backers might have serious issues. The promise of an infinite alternate reality in space that will be everything you want it to be is alluring, especially to people who aren't having the greatest run in the real world. I think this is predatory and terrible.
I love video games, I love the escapism, I love nerd culture. People willing to pay $1000 for a virtual spaceship are people I care about, and they deserve better.
Do they? People investing money through crowdfunding are just that, investors. If you invest 50$ and get 50 hours of game play, then the investment was good, independently of whether the game was released or not. If you invest 20.000$ and no game is ever released, and you don't get a % of the sales, then it was probably a bad investment.
Being a bad investor is not an illness. Just because we don't die easily anymore does not mean that our environment isn't hostile, that natural selection does not exist.
Some people want to have fulfilling lives that make the world a better place and become doctors, and nurses, and teachers, and cops, and firefighters, ... and work long hours, with little holiday, for little pay.
Others want to enjoy their every moment on earth, learn to exploit their environment for profit, and this is how it looks like nowadays. There are always people that are smarter than you, and there are always people that aren't.
Crowdfunding is great because it gives you access to thousands of non-professional investors that have too much money and don't know what they are doing. People who want a game go and buy a game, but these people made an investment. If that's bad, it is IMO their own fault.
All I would say to this is that there are plenty of very successful companies that I do not consider predatory.
A $10 ticket to Avengers:Endgame is a downright bargain, so is $15 a month for HBO.
I give $60+ dollars on the regular to companies like Rockstar and From Software with a huge smile on my face and then line up to do it again.
It is very possible to be successful and not rely on predatory practices. I think part of the problem is that as a society it is our responsibility collectively to punish the true predators. We seem to be getting worse and worse at this and the predators seem to be getting hungrier and hungrier...
I wouldn't say crowdfunding is in any way a financial investment.
Investment implies monetary return. so if the thing you're investing in is financially successful, you actually make more money than you put in. that doesn't describe kickstarter/indigogo style crowdfunding.
A campaign that says "give us x money and we will give you y reward with an intended time scale of z" (which is most kickstarters) is clearly (IMO) a sale.
You are a customer, paying money for a product.
There are crowd-funded investment platforms, which have different, more stringent, requirements, but Kickstarter is not one of them.
You've described someone in my family exactly. I agree that it's predatory and terrible; maybe it wasn't intended to be, but perpetuating the situation doesn't seem like the right approach.
Is this true? I through a lot of the early backers had pretty big, playable sections, just not a full MMO or single player campaign yet. Is that totally not true, or is it a really limited subset of backers that can access what's been released so far?
Just wondering, at what point has Star Citizen ever clearly looked like a 10+ year project? From what I can tell, according to the developers and many of the fans, Star Citizen has always been 2-3 away from release ever since it was announced. Or do you just mean that it clearly looked like a 10+ year project to you and you were otherwise okay with the developers misleading backers about the release timeline?
Isn’t the typical development time of any bigger game ~5 years? As somebody who followed the development with curiosity without backing anything, I never thought it was <5 years and given the scope I had the feeling it might be more.
But on the other hand, I don’t really get why it is so important how long it takes? As long as they get it done and as long as they can fund it who cares?
BTW, this article lists Pebble as a failure of crowdfunding. But . . . didn't they deliver a smart watch? I had one once upon a time, and it seemed to work fine, especially on Android. The company did not ultimately succeed, but it did at least deliver on its promises. I'd call it a kickstarter success, personally.
That really struck me as wrong too. The first kickstarter was certainly a success, as was at least the second one too.
Pebble failed when it tried to pivot to a more explicit fitness-focus, directly competing with Fitbit (though I'm not sure if this was not maybe intended to lead to the acquihire).
I'm still happily using my Pebble Time Steel as a wearable that tells me the time, notifies me when I get notifications on my Android phone and lets me dismiss calls, quickly send canned responses to messages on WhatsApp and control my phone's audio.
Ironically the only feature that seems to have stopped working that I notice is the step counter (because pressing the "up" button on the watch face tries to invoke it).
I installed it last night. It's a ~40 GB download. Right from the start it's very confusing and quite buggy. I'm sure there's some cool tech in there but they need to work on the initial experience if they want to attract new players with a free play week.
I also think it has "too much realism" disease. It's delivering on the dream of a space simulator where you can wake up in your bunk, walk to the flight deck, use the computer console to request your ship, walk to your assigned landing pad, climb the ladder into your cockpit, run through a preflight routine, and take off. But is all that fun?
A friend and I bought some ships a few years ago because it looked neat and the scope was so huge that it could be fun. We try it every point release to see if we can spawn in the same area, get in a ship, and then go do stuff together. We figure even if the game is unfinished, get some friends in a ship, find some pirates, and we can make our own fun at least.
The most infuriating bits is the intense attention to detail and realism in an alpha. For example, you can never just do stuff in the universe, you have to put your character into a mode so you can interact with objects, so you can't just like, open a door by hitting x like you do on a normal game, you have to point your cursor to the handle and then hit a button, and so on. Take that to the extreme and you find yourself spending tons of toil trying to figure out how to do basic things like ... partying up with a friend. Oops, someone opened the back door of the ship and Billy didn't have his helmet on, so he's dead and respawns back at Port Olisar so it will take him 45m to get here, except his ship is out of gas so he's stuck in space forever.
Those kinds of mechanics would be fun, in a _finished game_ where that was a balanced, but for now even sending messages to people is annoying because each and every interaction with the universe is via their little holodevice wrist thing that looks cool, but is unusable.
In the past like 2-3 years we've never been able to successfully pile a group of people into a ship and move from point A to point B. People do it all the time in videos and stuff, but so far watching other people play on twitch is much more fun than trying to do it yourself.
Over a decade ago I had friends try to get me to play the original Star Wars Galaxies. I remember one of them saying, "Yea I bought some couches for my house, and I'm working on getting..." and it took me a second before I realized, "Wait ... are you talking about ....Galaxies?!"
The amount of work they put into stupid little shit was insane. I have never played an MMO (EverCrack came out when I was in Uni; watched people get sucked into it; never played WoW even once) and I feel at this point in my life, I just need to be religiously opposed to them.
When I played during a previous free fly weekend, I initially spawned in much the way you describe, then died and respawned in a completely different location (a city of some kind) with no indication of what I should be doing, and no map to find my way around, and objective markers that would change what they point to whenever I would start getting closer. I never figured out what they were even pointing to. That experience put me off the game pretty much permanently.
You're spot on about "too much realism." The city I was in was incredibly intricate and didn't have any sort of layout that helps you navigate. So many areas I found my self lost in had seemingly no use to players in-game.
> Those 100 star systems? He has not completed a single one. So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid.
Lord. I had no idea it was THIS bad. This game was my son's first taste of Kickstarter pseudofraud. He got a good machine out of it from his dad (me), but he's still bitter 5 years later not being able to play what was promised.
I had a big StarCitizen fan for a coworker for a while and I asked him what he thought of that. His response was that the original 100 star systems weren't as vast and detailed as the singular system they're building now. He says the content and depth of the current system is far better than 100 empty systems.
I'm not sure entirely how I feel about that response. While I agree that fewer fully fleshed systems are better for a game it feels a lot like they promised things they had no clue about in the first place. Unless someone can possibly link me a brief overview of the original scope vs. what is in the works now I'm lead to believe my coworker had just been drinking the koolaid and will hand wave any scope creep that this project presents.
I'll peek at people playing star citizen on Twitch from time to time. It seems like the game crashes a lot, and it takes forever to get into actual action (like getting your ship and leaving the atmosphere takes like 10+ minutes), but the game has come a long way.
The main problem with Star Citizen, is that many of the crucial promised gameplay elements seem to be impossible to realize nowadays, especially when it comes to network architecture. Many MMO games struggle with 100 players fighting each other in the same spot. Star Citizen promised hundreds of ships fighting each other, each ship being a separate flying level with rooms, ladders etc. and people running within. The expectation is that you can blow a hole in the ship and then board it, all on a single game level, without any loading screens or special modes.
I wish the design team had courage to say "No, we won't implement that". Instead, everything that the players suggested was met with "That sounds interesting, we'd like to have that in the game at some point". This leads to unrealistic expectations. Many backers that haven't gave up yet have the unrealistic idea of the game in their minds, one that will never flourish. A game to end all games, a game in which you can be everyone, do everything. Whether you want to flip burgers on a passenger liner or lead an army to unexplored lands, Star Citizen has got you covered. Except it won't, because it's struggling to deliver the basic gameplay loops.
It was September 2012 when a friend of mine and I pledged some money. I was backer number ~ 2000. My friend jokingly said "We will have children by the time it comes out". Guess what.
They could have avoided the expensive actors, changing engine half-way, and they still should come out and say - we promised 1000 things. We can do 50 to get the ball rolling and we will do the following 950 in due time.
I really do hope that they put together at least the single player. We've spent money on the same sport simulators since '97. What's $50-$60?
Be careful with grouping/simplifying people into specific troupes. I have been closely following the details of Star Citizen's development for years, and even interviewed Chris and a few lead developers personally. They did have problems prior to late 2015 but since then the company drastically improved in a ton of areas (except marketing mistakes) as well as develop technologies no one else has. The company is legit and so is the game they're developing with backer funds.
But decide yourself, right now it's free flight all weekend which means you don't need to buy the game to test it out.
It's pretty wild to see what it's like as a new comer, very different from other space games out there right now even as an alpha. The official site to register for Star Citizen is the roberts space industries website, and if you use a star citizen referral code you get bonus ingame currency but I recommend to people to use this code STAR-GN2F-6JLW because it's from a high level backer group that allows everyone who uses the code to have access to an INSANELY large fleet, the site it's from is enlistcitizen.
In any event, people shouldn't take the article for more than face value as basically a tabloid piece, come to your own conclusion, try the game out when it's free. Which is any week they do free flight, which is usually once every 3 months or so.
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